Summer is happiness, and happiness is a strange thing that only happens in the past: it is a projection on a mathematically nonexistent point where what we long to have intersects with what we think we have lost. Therefore, returning to summer is impossible.
Nevertheless, each year summer insists on coming back. It settles in and displays its deceptive decorations, invites us to close our eyes and try to experience the moment of weightlessness where the temperature is just right, the breeze exact, the effort is minimal, and the body rolls down a gentle slope in neutral. One can abandon oneself, let the heat melt the mind and put it in a perfect state to relive the lost happiness. On reaching this state however, things do start to happen, but they never have the expected reconnection with the happiness from our past.
This was the summer; it was not on the beach, it was in the eyes of the person that we were in the past and cannot be again. An elusive and irretrievable dream lived just a few meters away from us by other future grown-up children. [Text: Luis López Navarro]
About María Sainz Arandia
María Sainz Arandia (1978) grown up in Viana, a small village in the north of Spain, moved to Valencia at the age of 17. Bachelor ́s degree in Fine Arts by UPV and in Artistic Photography by EASD, has completed training seminars and workshops focused on developing personal projects and graphic editing, with photographers like Rob Hornstra, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Chema Conesa, or David Jiménez, among others. Is actually studying a Master Degree in Cultural Management, and is part of the team of VA!, a contemporary photography magazine.
Her work has been finalist in Signo Editores Photography Contest 2018, Lensculture Street Photography Awards 2017, Encontros da Imagem Festival 2016, Luis Ksado Photographic Creation Price 2010, and was awarded with the Creation Art and Photography Grant of the Goverment of Navarra 2005. In 2017 she self-published her first photobook about the project “Summertime”, that was selected for the exhibition SCAN Photobooks 2018, and as one of the Iberoamerican Photobooks in Feira do Livro de Fotografia de Lisboa 2017. Interested in explore through image relations between human being and how we behave with the environment, her work moves between the poetic and the surreal, wondering about reality and fiction. Actually she is working on the relation between tourism and migration, and developing projects of participatory photography. [Official Website]
